Sunday, December 23, 2012

When we put the “body” and the pajamas on Adam, we chose
favorites. The blue! The one with the dogs! However, Adam doesn’t care. It isn’t
that he is indifferent so much as all of them are much the same to him. He
cries or sleeps in his foam bed. He recognizes our faces and touches. But as
far as objects go, outside of the flow of milk, the eyes and glasses that peer
down on him, the softness or roughness, dryness or wetness of the textiles he
comes into contact with, he has a bond with only one object. One bond that goes
beyond the sensual. Once bond that is, perhaps, his first experience of
fascination.

This is with Mr. Spooky.

Mr. Spooky is a milky white globe with bluisn circles for
its eyes and mouth, and bluish ears. Plug it in and press the top of it and it
turns on, emitting a bluish light that changes to green and back. The intensity
of the glow changes too. I don’t know who brought us Mr. Spooky, but it has
illuminated our darkest nights since the second day in the hospital, and Adam’s
second day on earth.

At night, as Adam digests his milk or formula at night and
ponders the world, at some point he always begins to stare at Mr. Spooky, wherever
we have perched him, wherever he casts his colored light. He may be looking at
a blanket, a pillow or a wall, but eventually he will shift and then he will
remain rapt in Mr. Spooky’s aura, drinking in Spookylight, in long pulls, just
as he sometimes drinks up formula.

I am not sure what Adam sees in Mr. Spooky. But I vaguely
recognize the reflex. I’ve been after Mr. Spooky substitutes my whole life –
fascinating objects, ideas, scenes, people that are beyond my mere round of
comforts and irritations, and that form an attraction that I can only explain
through a cracked, obsure poetry. That is because, in the end, these objects
are lit still in a pre-verbal night for me, back before the duty to match world
to word set me on an endless, exhausting chase. I like to watch Adam staring at
Mr. Spooky, it even makes me a little jealous. And it breaks my heart a bit to
think of all the Mr. Spookies yet to come for my Adam.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.